Darren Rowse has a problem segregating his friends from his fans in Facebook.  It’s a question of efficiency.  And I’d like to help him do that.

Apparently, Darren has already come to terms with the prospect of orphaning a good slice of the 5,000 Facebook friends he has.  What remains to be a problem for him is the most efficient way of doing it.

Darren  has a very good reason for realigning his Facebook community.  He needs to make his personal page truly a cozy place for his family and real life friends.  Check out Darren’s explanation why he’s jilting most of his Facebook friends in his latest post:  Dear Facebook Friends, I’m De-Friending Most of You [It's Not You, It's Me]

To do that he needs to start on a clean slate by unfriending 5, 000 people.

As of this writing, nobody has come up with a solution to make the task less tedious.  Do you know of a way to mass unfollow friends in Facebook?

Kindly tell Darren if you have any suggestion.

Because I cannot.  I’ve jumped the gun on him before he can unfriend me.  Argh, I had unfriended the great Darren Rowse.

Works better that way though.  Everyone smells better if I do it my way.

Darren,  unfriending you in Facebook is the last thing on my mind.  Truly sucks.  That’s easier to deal with though obviously.

There will be one slot more for your real life friends in Facebook.  By letting you go now, I hope others will take a hint and do likewise Yes, you need the full measure of 5,000 slots to accomodate them.  You’re Darren, after all.  Problogger.  Bigger than life.

It’s not as if you’re vanishing for good.  Your fans can still have a piece of you in your Problogger fan page. Everybody happy.

But who am I kidding, right?  Okay, here’s my two cents:

It’s a tad unfortunate that social media screws my concept of friendship. You’re very accessible 24/7.  You’re with us every night right in the comfort of our homes, offering solutions to our knotty problems in blogging.

You send us on writing assignments.  And we comply and we scurry  back with list posts to the  annoyance of some of our friends who think we’re soft in the head.  We don’t care.  We live for the pat on the back from the master.

Most of us mill about you but scared shitless to  say even a weak, “Howdy, mate!”  Guess, we’re more used to leaving comments in your blog than engaging you in banter in Facebook. Does it necessarily mean we’re less sincere about how we regard you?

Nope.

But we still fail you in that you’re looking for a friend.  Perhaps someone who knows exactly the number of bunions on your feet?  You’re looking for an equal and we can only muster with, “From which floor, Darren?” – if you ever ask us to jump off a building.

Alas, what we thought of us intimacy was a mirage.  And adulation can at any moment be a worthless currency.  Not really your fault.  It’s ours.  It’s mine.

And, of course, in the grand scheme of things, real friends matter more. Not fans or lurkers.    Not the social media engineered version of friends. But friends in its traditional meaning.  Hurray for Old World concepts.

And that for your own sanity, you need to screen out the noise from spammers, Facebook gamers and the sweaty masses.  I know how you feel and to think  I only have nearly 300 Facebook friends.

Lesson learned, lesson learned.

Here’s releasing you now to your real life friends.

Nothing personal.  Just want to make it easy for you.

Good luck, mate.

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